What's really scary

So it turns out that Doug Mastriano, the Trump-backed Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, prayed specifically for a rejection of the results of the 2020 Presidential elections right before the January 6th debacle at the nation's Capital, which he and his wife attended.

"God, I ask you that you help us roll in these dark times, that we fear not the darkness," he prayed in a video just located last Friday. "I pray that we'll take responsibility — we'll seize the power that we had given to us by the Constitution, and as well by You, providentially. I pray for the leaders also in the federal government, God, on the 6th of January that they will rise up with boldness."

Mastriano may be the boldest torch-carrier for Christian nationalism these days, at a moment in time when "Christian nationalism" is soaring among white evangelicals as a foundation for political action. Behind that popularity is a presentment among believers that God speaks plainly to them and to us, and that we can and should rely on that voice, sometimes still and small, and sometime booming, for determining our actions in this world. "The Lord told me on Tuesday morning to vote for Joe Biden"--that kind of thing, although most visions, most prophets, or so it appears, are granted politically conservative visions from a politically conservative god.

To me, that's scary.

As is David Clements, a handsome professorial type who is traveling into small town America preaching the terrors of a coming apocalypse with the specific message or application that voting machines can be manipulated and that, let's be sure, Donald Trump was, unequivocally, the winner of the 2020 Presidential election, "in a landslide," as Trump loves to repeat. Clements is among those who the Washington Post calls "self-appointed election fraud evangelists," in part because they lace their presentations with incantations to God/god.

Clements' own testimony includes the story of a visitation he experienced from the Almighty when he, distraught over what seemed to him to be a Biden victory in the last election. Beaten, he ran outside of the New Mexico cabin where he and his family were staying, fell to his knees before a campfire and said, "God save us, please, please save our country," or so he told an audience in Michigan. “Something happened. My heart filled … and I heard, ‘We are going to win.’ ”

Presumably, that was God talking. 

To me, that too is scary.

At least, that's what David Clements heard. What God/god told him that night is to take the good news of evil voting machines to the people in small towns across the nation and explain to them how the manipulation of voting tallies led to a disastrous result and must be reversed to alter the outcome of the 2020 election.  

I'm not hot on those men's political views--I'll admit that. But what scares me is that they're consider themselves prophets, what scares me is the way they employ the Creator of Heaven and Earth to buttress their politics.  They consider themselves recipients of God's own directions. They receive God's wisdom through His Word, but what's there in the book isn't enough. Instead, they listen to what they hear in the echo chambers of their minds and souls. "God told me this would happen." "God told me what to say." God told me what to sing." 

To me, that's just scary. 

But then, we just finished Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, which a ton of Christians perhaps shouldn't view or read because in Krakauer's story--as in real life--god told Utah's Lafferty brothers, fundamentalist LDS subscribers, to administer "blood atonement," according to old LDS doctrine, so they did--because god told them to. They murdered their own sister-in-law, as well as her baby, and actually did so proudly because god told them to.

That's very, very scary.